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“I heard Port Velvet stole all their ideas from Trent Reznor.” I didn’t say it, they did.
They—being Brent Knopf and Patti King—also say that “Port Velvet actually sounds quite different from Ramona Falls and Radiation City, actually.” You can judge for yourself when Port Velvet plays at Alberta Street Pub on Thursday, Sept. 4.
Knopf may be best known for his role in founding Menomena, contributing to the ascendant trio’s first four records during the aughts, but Ramona Falls has been his long-running, eclectic solo project. Meanwhile, King shared her Swiss Army knife instrumentalism and woven backing harmonies with Radiation City during the 2010s. Both multihyphenate members of Portland’s Port Velvet also feature notable collaborations on their résumé: Knopf and The National’s Matt Berninger released a record as EL VY in 2015, while King has spent years as a touring member of The Shins and Seattle’s Deep Sea Diver.
Yet, Port Velvet is the first time in King’s career when she’s ever done “the hard work” to define the project’s “sound and the influences,” attempting to “channel them whenever you can.” The pair would hear a song that stuck with them, and “we would spend the time listening to it and talking about it and connecting in that way.”
“We did decide early on that we did not want any acoustic guitar, pianos or strings on the record,” King says.
“Which is an interesting handicap to give to ourselves,” Knopf jumps in, “because Patti is an incredible violin player, and I’m pretty decent on piano.” In reality, they each took the instrument they’re best at and said, “‘OK, we can’t use that.’ So we started out by just hobbling ourselves aesthetically in that way.”
Next, they kept themselves “cloistered,” in Knopf’s words, trusting “each other to dial it in” without any outsiders affecting their nascent vision—this means they didn’t share any of their new creations with friends. That specific sound they were homing in on at North Portland’s Falcon Art Community was synth pop. As soon as the two got together, they immediately bonded over the sonic stylings of the soundtrack to 1984’s The NeverEnding Story.
“That was one of the first linchpins for us,” Knopf says, “and then it expanded from there to some Billy Idol, Rebel Yell, and then some Cyndi Lauper, She’s So Unusual, and Tears for Fears, The Hurting.”
All three of these seminal New Wave records came out in the same year. “There was an uncanny locus from whatever was in the water in 1983 that we kind of went back to that well for some divination,” Knopf says.
These inspirations, alongside more modern ones (Portishead, Chairlift, Nine Inch Nails), were part of “a daily dose” these Port Velveteers listened to while working on Midnight Is Calling, the duo’s first record, which was self-released on April 11.
The 10-track debut is a synth-pop album through and through. There are so many stylistic moments that cull from the great ’80s pantheon and aforementioned artists. The opening notes of lead single “Hold Still” invoke Kraftwerk while reflecting on Knopf’s experience with hypnosis, and the painstakingly handcrafted stop-motion music video also transports you back to simpler analog times.
Sure, you can hear Reznor’s crunchy, industrial influence at times, but Midnight Is Calling is rich with very specific, idiosyncratic synth sounds—sometimes even silly ones à la Oingo Boingo or Falco—and incredible midsong breakdowns. It’s this rare ability to take something so off the wall and make it into an undeniable bop like Port Velvet does on standout songs “Man Overboard,” “Spider in the Web” and “Eyes on Us.” This is a talent that Lauper, Rick Astley and Depeche Mode all possessed in the ’80s, but here it’s buttressed by King’s strong but sweet vocals, which coax and soar.
The record’s cover art features an allorax, a part fox, part raven creature of their creation and a metaphor for this partnership. “Those two creatures together represent the blend of chaos and order,” King says.
Midnight Is Calling is the confluence of these two forces: Knopf is the fox and the chaos, while King proffers the raven’s order—a concept “that’s present in the music where unexpected things can happen, but then there’s also like structure and patterns and things that you can predict,” King explains.
The duo harnesses this ’80s spirit and combines it with current dance music sensibilities and dramatic balladry. “There’s almost an uncompromising, purist approach to our process, because we were so precious about it all,” Knopf says. The synth-heavy focus “let us really dive in and shape each timbre until it felt just right in the song,” he continues. “So, in some ways, playing synths allows for being attentive to many more variables and nuances of how it sounds.”
“Recording with synths to MIDI allowed for collaborative composition after the fact,” King adds. “So if we wanted to change notes of a performance after tracking it, we could.”
SEE IT: Port Velvet and Rosy Boa at Alberta Street Pub, 1036 NE Alberta St., 503-284-7665, albertastreetpub.com. 8 pm Thursday, Sept. 4. $16.55–$18.